Alfred Swaine Taylor, MD, (1806-1880): forensic toxicologist.

The systematic study of forensic toxicology dates from the end of the eighteenth century. It arose as a branch of forensic medicine concerned with the problem of proving deliberate poisoning in criminal cases. It was often very difficult to distinguish symptoms produced by many common poisonous plants like belladonna (deadly nightshade) and henbane from those of certain diseases. Medicines also frequently involved the use of poisonous substances and most physicians agreed that a better knowledge of the chemical properties and physiological effects of poisons would aid diagnosis and treatment as well as the search for antidotes. Moreover, some physiologists thought that the ability to trace the passage of poisons through the body would offer a new tool for investigating metabolic changes and the functions of the organs. All of these advances would depend on the development of more reliable methods of chemical analysis. The common reagents, such as barium chloride, silver nitrate, hydrogen sulphide or copper sulphate, used by chemists to identify mineral substances had long been known, but from the beginning of the nineteenth century the methods of inorganic qualitative analysis were improved and systematized. 1 New tests were added to those already well-known, new techniques were devised and better analytical schemes for the identification of mineral acids, bases, and salts in solution were drawn up. Chemists like Richard Kirwan2 in Ireland studied the analysis of minerals and mineral waters while C. R. Fresenius, in Germany, who in 1862 founded the first journal entirely devoted to analytical chemistry,3 devised the first workable analytical tables. In organic analysis too, there were considerable improvements from